November 18, connecting Santahamina Island [Finlande] in Rostock in Germany and 1,173 kilometers long, the C-Lion1 submarine telecommunications cable was cut halfway, in a sector “far from maritime traffic” located in the exclusive economic zone [ZEE] from Sweden.
No seismic activity having been detected at the time of the events and the hypothesis of a landslide having been ruled out, the Finnish public operator Cinia estimated that this rupture could only have been caused by an “external force”. . However, he refrained from talking about sabotage, for lack of having tangible elements to prove it.
The Finnish intelligence service, SuPo, was also cautious about the origin of this “incident”. It is “too early to determine the cause of the rupture of C-Lion1”, commented a spokesperson, recalling that “200 ruptures of submarine cables occur each year in the world”, most often in accidental, during “human activities”, such as fishing.
After all, a ship's anchor could well have scraped the bottom where the C-Lion1 lay. Except that a second submarine cable, the Arelion, which connects Lithuania to the island of Gotland [Suède]was also cut.
Here again, he would have been the victim of an “external force”, according to the spokesperson for the Lithuanian subsidiary of the Swedish operator Telia. The damage was noted on November 17. But for the Swedish company Arelion, its owner, it is still too early to speak of sabotage. “We are in contact with the authorities and the Swedish defense forces,” she said.
In the meantime, given that these incidents occurred within its EEZ, Sweden has opened two separate investigations.
“The relevant authorities are investigating these events. […] The government is following these cases very closely as the security context has deteriorated. It is absolutely necessary to determine the reasons why these two cables no longer work,” Carl-Oskar Bohlin, the Swedish Minister of Civil Defense, told public broadcaster SVT.
However, the hypothesis of a “hybrid operation”, and therefore that of sabotage, was strongly suggested in a press release published jointly by the German and Finnish foreign ministries.
“We are deeply concerned about the rupture of the submarine cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage says a lot about our times,” responded Annalena Baerbock, the head of German diplomacy, and Elina Valtonen, her Finnish counterpart.
He added: “Our security is threatened not only by Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, but also by hybrid warfare waged by malicious actors. Protecting our shared critical infrastructure is essential to our security and the resilience of our societies.”
However, later, Ms. Baerbock argued that the almost simultaneous rupture of two submarine cables in the Baltic Sea could “not be a coincidence, taking into account other hybrid threats coming from Russia”, such as “cyberattacks, surveillance of critical infrastructure, parcel bombs”. “It can’t all be coincidences,” she insisted.
Meanwhile, the Finnish Central Criminal Police [KRP] announced that it would also investigate the causes of the rupture of the C-Lion1 cable.
Regardless, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has very few doubts. “No one believes these cables were cut by accident […]. We must start from the principle […] that this is sabotage,” he said, on the sidelines of a meeting with his European counterparts in Brussels on November 19. “I do not believe in the versions of the anchors which would have accidentally caused damage to these cables,” he insisted.
Photo : https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
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